Setting up a Bluehornet Welcome Email via an API Call

Email Campaign Manager

Creating the Welcome Message

We’ve spoken previously about WHY to set up a welcome email and now we are going to show you HOW to do this within Bluehornet, an ESP we use extensively. Navigate to your BlueHornet Account under Messages. You will see an option to “Create New Welcome Message.”
Now you can begin the creation of your first Welcome Email.

From here you have your message details, Message Header/Footer, and your HTML Format. Similar to setting up a normal email, you create your Welcome messages as you see fit for what audience you are targeting. Easily drop your HTML into the email for a simple creation.

The next step is managing and tracking links.

Considering this email will reach every subscriber that signs up through your channels, it is essential to track the appropriate links within your email. This will identify your links automatically and all you have to do is select the links that you want to track by checking the boxes next to each link. What is exciting about this feature is the “Segment Clickers” section. This allows you to automatically segment anyone that clicks on specific links in your Welcome email to be segmented and targeted for a subsequent send. Why is this important? You can REtarget people that are actually engaging in your emails. Knowing where your customer clicks can help identify what they are most interested in and automatically segment them into the appropriate content.

The final step of setting up a triggered Welcome email is choosing when you want your subscribers to receive the email.

You have two options: Immediately and one day later. We highly encourage an immediate send because you will never have a more engaged subscriber than the moment they give you their email address. Simply “Enable “ your welcome email, review, and save. Your email is ready to send! Start this as “disabled” until you have set up your API Call.

Now you need to enable an API call to your welcome email to generate the trigger to subscribers.

In order to start sending you need to set up an API call that directs the information to BlueHornet and triggers the email message to the subscriber. First, you will need to set-up your welcome message criteria by navigating to your “manage welcome emails” section. From here, set your message trigger criteria, which is what the Welcome utilizes to identify the correct email and trigger it. You can create a personalized one, but stick with something simple and descriptive. Next step is creating your API User Key In the administrative section you are able to create a new API User Key. You will have the option to restrict access the API will have, as well as the whitelisted IP’s that you need identified. Label the API to help distinguish it from others that will be created. As you can see you are provided an API Key as well as a Shared Secret Key. They both will be utilized in your API Call that you set up with your development team. The last step! The following is an example of what you might insert into an API call. This is the minimum required code for Bluehornet: